Month: August 2019

I just attended my 14th Global Leadership Summit (GLS). Every year I have implemented at least one big insight into my leadership and our church. I’ve always had a number of personal things I was able to put into practice to help me be a better person and leader. Regardless of the conference you choose, pick at least one really good leadership conference to attend every year. The “break” from work and the infusion of leadership insights is vital if we are to continue to grow as leaders. I’ve included the link to my friend Josh Reich’s blog where he recorded 202 Favorite Quotes from the 2019 Leadership Summit.

Words for My Experience

Often a speaker or preacher will state a principle or idea that you know immediately rings true. You know it’s true because they put words to what you experienced. When you hear the idea or principle there’s this immediate reaction of “Yes!” inside. That was my experience on Thursday morning of the GLS.

Start Somewhere…Just Start!

Liz Bohannon (author of Beginner’s Pluck) shared her story, journey, and the principles that helped her see a huge dream become reality. One key part of her journey was that she had to go from dreaming big to dreaming small. That is counter-intuitive and counter-cultural. I’ll bet you have never heard anyone tell you to dream small! I had never heard that idea even floated. She said before your big dream can become real, you need to dream small. A big dream can immobilize you, overwhelm you, and keep you stuck. Big dreams easily bring out the naysayers and cause us to doubt, find and listen to excuses, and allow fear to immobilize us.

To get unstuck and move toward your dream you have to do something… anything that might take a step toward your dream. You have to start somewhere. Liz Bohannon said be a doer, not just a dreamer, or dream small first. The question you and I must ask ourselves is what is the next step toward the dream that God has given me. Determine what God wants you to do, not what others want, or think you should do.

My Big Dream

Then as I reflected on what she was saying it hit me that I have actually put that very principle into action. Sometime around 1986, God gave me a big dream. I wanted to have a part in reaching the 1.2 billion Muslims (now 1.8 billion) with the good news of Jesus. I gathered a group of folks at my church and every week we prayed. That was the first step toward my dream.

Then, I connected with a mission agency (Team Expansion) that also had a parallel dream. However, it is interesting that I had never met a real Muslim, at least not that I was aware of. Honestly, I figured the best that might happen is we provide prayer and financial support for someone who would go to a Muslim people group.

Doug Lucas, my friend and leader of Team Expansion, traveled to Moscow in 1990, in what was the Soviet Union, to try to meet folks from what we called Soviet Central Asia (or the “Stans” – Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, etc.). However, he “failed” and didn’t make a connection. He did meet leaders of a church in southern Ukraine from the city of Kherson, which was seated right above the Crimea. We had never heard of the place. But the church wanted help to learn to do ministry. And we discovered there was an unreached Muslim group a couple of hours from them – The Crimean Tatar. So it was time to take the next step.

Explore and Evaluate

Doug and I visited to see what the situation looked like in Ukraine. I was blown away by the desire these Christians in Kherson had to reach people. They had been persecuted in the Soviet system for seventy years but were ready to use their newfound freedoms (Ukraine became an independent country in 1991) for Christ.

The next step? I asked our church in Cincinnati to send me and my family for ten months to see what was realistic and to figure out the next steps. The ten months spent there confirmed we needed to go further. So we recruited another family and together served there for four more years. I had to learn the Russian language and culture. We helped start new churches. We helped them develop programs to serve their community. Eventually, we helped them send the first Ukrainian missionaries to the Tatars. We helped start a training institute called Tavriski Christian Institute (TCI) in 1997. Today TCI is a government accredited college and they are helping support and fuel church planting movements in Central Asia (no names for the safety of those in the countries).

What’s Your Small Dream?

The big dream of reaching Muslims in the heart of the old Soviet Union felt like an overwhelming and impossible task. Honestly, it was. I just had to take a step at a time. It started with years of prayer, followed by a short visit, followed by a ten-month exploratory time, followed by a four-year investment. When we left in 1998, I could have never imagined the impact God was having in the hardest to reach and most dangerous places in the world. Yes, there was always fear. There were huge challenges. There were all kinds of reasons why this should have never worked. But we chose to walk through each fear and challenge.

This story is repeated over and over in our Bible! God had a HUGE dream for Abraham. He would be the father of a great nation so huge that no one could take a complete census! But at first, he only had to do one thing – “Go…to the land I will show you.” The first step was to move his family. Yes, it was hard and there were lots of unknowns. But that was the action that would allow God to continue to make the big dream a reality. It is interesting that Abraham didn’t get to see the dream and promise fully completed in his own lifetime. But his obedience ultimately led to Israel becoming a nation that brought us the Messiah and you and me having faith and eternal hope.

What’s your “big” dream? Has God put one on your heart? Don’t ignore it. But don’t get stuck there either. What do you do with big dreams? You start small. To move toward your dream you have to do something. You have to start somewhere. Be a doer, not just a dreamer. You have to take a step toward your dream. Dream small before you’ll ever hope to live your big dream. What’s that step? Pray about it. Tell others what it is. Do it!

I once taught at Pacific Christian College (now Hope International University). I was home one evening grading papers. I read one and gave it a grade and then read the next one on the pile. It had the very same content – word for word. My first question was why would someone copy a paper and then put it right on top of the one they copied it from?

Now, I didn’t know which person did the cheating. So I called both ladies into my office. I showed the papers and asked who wrote the original and who copied. They were silent and kept looking at each other. I waited. Finally, one said they copied if from another roommate. The other student had done the same. They both copied from a third person and didn’t know each other had the same idea. That’s why they both came in on top of each other. I warned them both about cheating and that if I caught them copying again, they could fail the class and even be dismissed from the college.

A few weeks later, I caught one of them cheating again, this time on a test. I met with her and asked her why she would cheat again and take such a risk. What I was really trying to do was discover what would motivate such behavior that would cause her to cheat with such consequences. She said he was under great pressure from home to get straight A’s. She said she found college to be much harder than she expected and she could not go home failing or having poor grades. She lived in fear of her parents’ reaction. After a long discussion, I asked her to go home for the rest of the semester. I made sure she understood this was not punishment, but I urged her to work out her relationship with her parents through a counselor. She did just that and came back to school the next semester and eventually graduated from college. She also developed a great relationship with her parents.

One of the greatest things I learned from my mentor in college was this simple life-changing principle: All behavior is motivated. He got it from the well-known author Larry Crabb. It’s simple and basic. I’ll bet it didn’t blow you away or knock you off your chair. But it’s so profound and so easily forgotten. Someone in your church, organization or even in your house attacks you or unfairly criticizes you and you react in a way that you later regret. People act the way they do for a reason. You react for a reason. The words and tone both you and your detractor used were motivated by something.

I’ve come to realize in the last few years that there are many in my church who suffer from serious abuse issues that caused trauma. These folks are not just those who were in the military (there are many who suffer from PTSD for sure). So many folks have suffered emotional, verbal, physical, sexual and spiritual abuse from others. I’m amazed at how many people come to our church and later report the horrible abuse they experienced from spiritual leaders in their lives who used their power to control, shame, use, and abuse. I give out so many books on spiritual abuse because folks didn’t even know that such a thing exists. But they feel the effects of it.

A person’s hang-ups, hurts, bad habits or addictions are often a way to cope with the trauma they experience or have experienced in the past. All behavior, good or bad, is motivated by something. We have to get past the behavior itself and understand what is deeper that drives the behavior.

Most of us look at this principle and can agree with it. It makes perfect sense. We become very utilitarian about it. We want to use it to help someone change their behavior and help them discover and address what causes or caused their actions. We use it to change the behavior of that critical person or even our spouse.

We might even go one more step and look at ourselves and wonder why we did what we did or said what we said to try and discover our motivations. Good reflection can lead to self-awareness that can help us change our behavior.

We use this principle to keep us from being and staying judgmental. Not that we excuse any bad behavior, but it helps us move from judgment to caring help when we understand or even seek to understand what motivates behavior.

But we won’t get to these places of clarity until we consistently take the time to understand first. First, understand. That for me is the greatest application of the fact that all behavior is motivated. What a great aspiration. It’s an awareness. It’s a commitment. It’s a learned habit. First, understand before you respond or react. Ask genuine questions (not questions with a point). Seek to understand what motivates or motivated the behavior. That very effort can change how we see and respond to a person and has power to help that person.

I love how Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People says it. He reminds us that we are at our best as a leader and as a person when we seek to “understand before being understood.” Our human pride that feeds our brokenness wants others to understand how we feel, why we did what we did or didn’t do first. But the key to great leaders is that they, out of humility, seek first to understand before being understood. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being understood, but when we set that on the shelf, then we can listen and try to understand the motivation that leads to the action.

I know, this isn’t rocket science. So why is this not our first and natural response – first understand. It’s because of the power of pride in all of our lives. Humility is a choice. Out of humility, we can also decide to first understand. If we do it enough and often, it might even become a habit!